It looks kind of kinky, me waddling around town with a big belly. But really it’s an excellent way of carrying your kid around. I can thoroughly endorse the Maya wrap slings, although if I were doing it again I’d get one with a shorter tail. Our older daughter has travelled zero feet in a buggy in her whole life. Slings, shoulders and walking make up the rest.
Anyhow, the evening walk with the baby under the coat is good think-time. So here’s some thought-entropy from Martin’s brain from a night or two ago, courtesy of the voice note feature of my phone.
#1: One of the ideas of me going walkies with the baby in the evening is so she is warm and rocked to sleep in a dark place during peak colic hours. In the meantime, my wife can render her older sister unconscious. (I also get to work off some of the fat and flab that seems to creep in with marriage and parenthood!) But whatever happens, I mustn’t bring a screamy infant home when big sister isn’t yet asleep. Now, my wife could call me to say she’s slipped into the Land of Nod, but that’s a bit over the top. She could SMS me, but that’s kind of an expensive way to transmit such a puny and useless bit of information.
So I started to think: how to price discriminate SMS better? My idea was the “SMS Ping”. You just select someone from your address book, and select “Ping!” from the menu. I think you can guess what happens next — they get a fixed “I pinged you!” text message. Mechanically still an SMS, but economically a different beast.
So I could agree with my wife that she’ll ping me when the older one is asleep. Pings could be configured to not even ring the phone, having a different behavior to vanilla SMS.
The underlying observation is that the success of SMS may in fact be somewhat of a mirage. What people are doing is using SMS to make up for the presence system that the mobile operators forgot to build. Enrich the pricing scheme for SMS and people can afford a wider range of presence messages. And if you’re a mobile operator, shouldn’t you be thinking that there could be a little pile of gems under the presence stone?
#2: This isn’t an original thought, I’m sure. But no harm in reproducing it. When I’m carrying the wee one around in the sling, I can’t wander the streets with my wife’s iPod any more. I use some rather expensive but truly wonderful earphones that block out all the world. But with a baby attached you need to be able to hear if, say, she pukes her guts out (a not infrequent occurence). You need to hear it so you can be a hero and rescue her from suffocating, choking oblivion. So now I rather wistfully notice all the other people around using their iPods as an (anti-)social dissociative anaesthetic.
The iPod will be tumbled from its pedestal. Some assert it’ll be the mobile phone that kills the iPod. I tend to agree in general, although I think the timescale will be longer because the challenge of battery life will take years to sort out. A flat iPod is a minor bother, whereas a flat mobile is a real problem.
No, what’ll topple the iPod is when someone really makes music social again. It could be physical proximity based, it could be “logical proximity” (friends or others with similar tastes). Somehow, the joy of sharing music and knowing you made someone else happy by recommending good stuff will eclipse the stand-alone listening experience. The only question is who will crack the functional and business issues in making it happen.
#3. I’ll join two disparate dots. The first is Douglas Galbi’s paper on presense which you should read, or at least get the summary. The other is my essay on how successful products are those that make your customers happy, and transcend mere function.
Now I see the connection between these two. I think these are saying the same thing from different approaches. We’re all junkies for neurochemical stimulation. Some achieve this through productive means, others through destructive. Our entertainments are centred around exciting our monkey brains. Darkened movie theatres with loud noise and bright wide-field pictures; strobed dancefloors and tranced-out music in the nightclub; the soothing hypnotic backdrop of TV; the excitement of the rolllercoaster. What Douglas calls “sensual media” is a codeword for “highly dopamine/seratonin/etc. stimulating” (there’s lots to choose from).
We’re addicted to attention, praise, distraction, status. Yet the types of committee that come up with systems like MMS are only interested in traditional functional attributes that bridge obvious user desires. What matters is how the product makes the user feel, not what it did. (Indeed, the iPod’s success was the perfect blend of function and form — that form and white earbuds being a social signal about the user’s superior aesthetic habits despite the Apple price premium.)
Being useful is potentially a downright disadvantage! I suspect that blockbuster communications products almost certainly cannot emerge from a traditional user needs and product design process. The more a communications tool is used for “useless social chatter” the more certain you can be of its vitality.
UPDATE: With this last one, forget “Location-based services”. Think: “Emotion-based services”.
UPDATE: Here’s a social music application from the research labs.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 02:56 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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